Scumpia, Moldova

Eu sunt gata cu traningul de vara.

Yesterday I was sworn in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer and was immediately whisked away to my new permanent site of Scumpia, Moldova. A village about 2 hours away from the capital that is home to about 2 thousand people not including the sizable proportion that is living overseas.

After we swore in all of the volunteers were pressured by their partners to leave as soon as possible and it really caught me off guard by how difficult it was to say goodbye to all of the Volunteers, especially the ones I had been living in Truseni with. It really made me nervous when I got in the car with my partner teacher and the mayor and started to realize that from now on I would be on my own and would probably not see the other volunteers until the first week of November when we come back to the capital for another week of training together.

Now I have been given the day off by the school director, who does not speak any English, in order to rest and relax but I am expected to show up at the school on Friday to start planning for the next school year. I am expecting to teach about 6 classes each of them will be a different grade and will require that I plan a different lesson for each class I teach. The good news is that I will probably only teach 3 classes each day, as classes are mostly every other day, similar to a college class schedule (M, W, F or Tu,TH).

As for my living situation in my new town I am very satisfied and very lucky because for the next two weeks my host brother is home and speaks great English (as well as Turkish, Romanian, and Russian). So if I have two weeks to encounter and solve any problems I might have while I have a live in translator, after the two weeks he will be going back to college in Turkey and I will be on my own because as far as I know my partner teacher is the only one to speak English in my town.

Once he leaves I will be living in my own casa mica, small house, which has about five small rooms. I have an indoor bathroom and an indoor shower, although I will have to walk outside to the other casa mica that my house grandmother lives in to get to it…which may cause issues in the winter time. Also my walk to school is less than five minutes.

Luckily everything is going well at my new site because I know that if I did not have a good situation or a good host family it would make my transition a lot more difficult and I would have a harder time getting over being alone in a new village, without English speakers, or even not knowing any one who speaks Romanian.

Also since I have internet access I am hoping to keep my blog post frequent and up to date and to post a load of pictures as soon as I have time to take some of my new town.